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Doing is Being

Triston Ritter

Systems Architect & Dev Team Lead

I turn the feeling of limitless possibility into working systems, then teach others to do the same.

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About

Distilling magic into science

For seven years I have built and architected software, most of it in C#. I designed an accounting system from the ground up in ASP.NET MVC, integrated third-party platforms, and reverse engineered vendor code to turn one-off solutions into answers for a much wider set of problems.

What drives me is taking something that feels like magic, a hard problem or a tangle of constraints, and refining it into a repeatable, efficient process. Then I hand that capability to the people around me so the whole team levels up. These days that means leading our enterprise development team.

Since late 2024 I have been all-in on the AI shift: ChatGPT, Cursor, and Claude Code in daily practice, then rolled out at scale across our development teams. And because I build games in my spare time, I think about software the way a designer thinks about mechanics: the system only matters if the experience lands.

What I do

Three ways I show up

Problem-Solver

A nerd for hard problems. I dig into the messy core, find the underlying pattern, and ship a clean solution.

Builder / Architect

Seven years designing and building systems, turning fuzzy possibility into dependable, well-structured software.

Leader / Teacher

I lead our enterprise dev team by leveling people up: refining processes, sharing the craft, multiplying impact.

Skills

The toolbox

Languages

  • C#
  • TypeScript
  • JavaScript
  • SQL

Architecture

  • ASP.NET MVC
  • Systems Design
  • APIs & Integrations
  • Reverse Engineering

AI-Augmented Development

  • Claude Code
  • Cursor
  • ChatGPT
  • AI Adoption at Scale

Leadership

  • Team Mentorship
  • Enterprise Project Leadership
  • Code Review
  • Technical Strategy

Work & experience

Built, shipped, led

Enterprise Dev Team Lead

Present

Current Role

Lead the senior dev team through our enterprise projects: architecture direction, mentorship, and process refinement while staying hands-on in code.

  • Leadership
  • Architecture

Current Role · Present

Enterprise Dev Team Lead

Day to day this means setting architecture direction for the senior team, staying hands-on in the code that matters, and keeping delivery honest across our enterprise projects.

The other half of the job is multiplication: refining how the team works, mentoring developers through hard problems, and making sure every project leaves the people on it stronger.

AI Tooling at Company Scale

Late 2024 - Present

Developer Experience

Brought ChatGPT, Cursor, and Claude Code from personal practice to standard practice, rolling AI-augmented workflows out across our development teams.

  • AI
  • Process
  • Enablement

Developer Experience · Late 2024 - Present

AI Tooling at Company Scale

Started as personal practice in late 2024: ChatGPT, then Cursor, then Claude Code, each treated like any other system to learn, master, and make repeatable.

Then came the scale-up: turning individual experiments into standard practice and rolling AI-augmented workflows out across our development teams.

Accounting System from the Ground Up

Multi-year

Flagship Build

Architected and built a full accounting system from scratch in C# and ASP.NET MVC: data model, business rules, reporting, and the daily workflows that keep the books honest.

  • C#
  • ASP.NET MVC
  • Systems Design

Flagship Build · Multi-year

Accounting System from the Ground Up

A multi-year, ground-up build in C# and ASP.NET MVC: the data model, the business rules, the reporting, and the daily workflows that keep the books honest.

Ground-up means every layer was a design decision: how the data model bends without breaking, where business rules live, and how reporting stays trustworthy as the system grows.

Integrations & Reverse Engineering

Ongoing

Platform Work

Connected third-party platforms and reverse engineered vendor code to replicate unique solutions, turning one-off fixes into patterns that serve a wider problem set.

  • Integrations
  • Reverse Engineering

Platform Work · Ongoing

Integrations & Reverse Engineering

Connected third-party platforms into our systems, and when a vendor's one-off solution did something we needed, reverse engineered it to understand the mechanism underneath.

The payoff is generalization: single-purpose fixes became patterns that answer a much wider set of problems.

Time Metrics App

2025

Solo Build

Designed and shipped an easy-to-use time metrics app solo, giving us accurate accounting of hours across client work and internal development projects.

  • Product
  • Full-Stack

Solo Build · 2025

Time Metrics App

Designed, built, and shipped solo in 2025: an easy-to-use time metrics app that gives us accurate accounting of hours across client work and internal development.

A team of one owns the full product surface: the experience, the data model, and the reports people actually read.

Indie Game Development

Pre & Post AI

Personal Lab

Games are where I pressure-test ideas: mechanics as systems, stories as user experiences. The lab where new tools and patterns get tried first.

  • Game Dev
  • Systems Thinking

Personal Lab · Pre & Post AI

Indie Game Development

Games are the lab: mechanics as systems, stories as user experiences, and no better place to pressure-test a new tool or pattern before it reaches production work.

The current project is The Wretched Few, a systems-driven, story-first game in active development.

The journey

How I got here

  1. High school, sophomore year

    First lines of code

    Wrote my first programs as a sophomore in high school and never stopped. The pull was immediate: describe a system precisely enough and it comes to life.

  2. The early builds

    Text adventures and 3D platformers

    Built text-based adventure games, then 3D platformers. Games are unforgiving systems work: state, rules, feedback loops, and an experience that has to feel right.

  3. 2019

    Going pro with C#

    Started my professional career building business software in C#. Learned that production code is a promise you keep every day.

  4. The architect years

    Building from the ground up

    Architected an accounting system from scratch in ASP.NET MVC, integrated third-party platforms, and reverse engineered vendor code to generalize unique solutions to a wider problem set.

  5. Late 2024

    The AI boom hits the workflow

    Went deep on AI-assisted development early: ChatGPT, then Cursor, then Claude Code. Treated it like any other system: learn it, master it, make it repeatable.

  6. 2025

    AI at scale, teams leveled up

    Rolled AI tooling out across our development teams, led the senior team's enterprise projects, and solo-built a time metrics app for accurate client and internal time accounting.

  7. Now

    The Wretched Few and what's next

    Leading by day, building by night. My current game project, The Wretched Few, is where systems thinking and storytelling meet.

Contact

Let's build something

Open to interesting problems, collaborations, and conversations.

tristonritter9@gmail.com
GitHubLinkedIn

Off the clock

Triston

Storyteller · Game-maker · Perpetual tinkerer

Same brain, fewer meetings. Here's the stuff I make for fun.

When I'm not architecting systems, I'm chasing ideas: writing stories, building games, running D&D tables, and following curiosity wherever it goes.

Games

Things I've built to play

I've been making games since high school. They're the purest form of systems design: every mechanic is a promise to the player.

In development

The Wretched Few

My current game project and favorite obsession. Systems-driven and story-first, built around what the player actually feels moment to moment.

Mechanics are storytelling. The rules whisper the theme before a single line of dialogue lands.

  • Systems-driven
  • Story-first
  • In development

Now · In development

The Wretched Few

The design process runs feeling-first: decide what the player should feel in a moment, then build the mechanic that delivers it. The rules carry the theme before any dialogue does.

In active development now, and my favorite thing to talk about. Ask me and I will absolutely talk your ear off.

  • Systems-driven
  • Story-first
  • In development

The early years

Text-based adventures

Where it all started. Worlds made of words, parsers full of edge cases, and players who always type the one thing you didn't expect.

The player's imagination is the best graphics engine ever shipped.

Play it

The early years · Shipped to friends

Text-based adventures

The first worlds I ever shipped, back in high school: rooms, verbs, and a parser slowly learning to survive players who type the unexpected.

They taught the founding lesson: the player's imagination outrenders any engine, as long as the words point it somewhere good.

The Mansion, the first of them, survived the years: I restored it and you can play it right here. Wake up in a creepy mansion, get out alive, and maybe even find your way home.

  • Interactive fiction
  • First builds
  • Playable

The middle years

3D platformers

Jumping puzzles, camera fights, and the eternal hunt for game feel. Equal parts math and vibes.

If the jump feels wrong, nothing else matters. Feel first, features second.

The middle years · Playable experiments

3D platformers

The middle years: jumping puzzles, camera fights, and hours tuning arcs and acceleration until a jump finally felt right.

Half the work was math, half was vibes, and all of it was learning that game feel is a feature you build on purpose.

  • 3D
  • Game feel

Story worlds

Worlds with working parts

Years of D&D worldbuilding and storytelling taught me that a good world is a well-architected system people can live in.

Emotional depth

A plot twist is cheap. An emotional truth the players carry home is the whole point. Build for the feeling, not the reveal.

Grounded improv

Improvise freely, but from solid ground. When the world's rules stay consistent, every surprise still makes sense in hindsight.

Player experience first

The best stories are built around what the player experiences. It's the user story, just with more dragons.

Worlds are systems too. Same architecture brain, different medium.

Off screen

The rest of the character sheet

Watching

  • Final Space
  • Invincible
  • Meet the Robinsons
  • A rotating anime queue

Playing

  • Magic: The Gathering
  • Board games
  • Card games
  • D&D (forever DM)

Listening

  • Audiobooks, constantly

Surrounded by Idiots (Thomas Erikson)

I love stories but reading is not my medium, so I listen. This one stuck: the four-color model changed how I read a room and lead a team.

Riding

  • Snowboarding
  • Cold mornings
  • One more run

Origin story

How this all started

  1. High school, sophomore year

    First lines of code

    Sophomore year of high school I discovered you could type things into a computer and make worlds happen. It was over for me after that.

  2. The early builds

    Text adventures and 3D platformers

    Text adventures first (words are free), then 3D platformers. Nothing teaches you game feel like a jump that is slightly wrong.

  3. 2019

    Going pro with C#

    Turned the hobby into a job. Same puzzle-solving brain, now with stakes and stakeholders.

  4. The architect years

    Building from the ground up

    Built an accounting system from nothing, glued platforms together, and reverse engineered other people's code like an archaeologist with a debugger.

  5. Late 2024

    The AI boom hits the workflow

    Started pair programming with the robots. ChatGPT, Cursor, Claude Code. Turns out they never need coffee breaks.

  6. 2025

    AI at scale, teams leveled up

    Got the whole team building with AI, led the big projects, and built a little time-tracking app solo because spreadsheets deserved better.

  7. Now

    The Wretched Few and what's next

    Current obsession: The Wretched Few, my game in progress. It has been pretty great. Come ask me about it.

Say hi

Come say hi

Games, worlds, snowboards, or systems. If any of this sounds fun, I want to hear from you.

tristonritter9@gmail.com
GitHubLinkedIn